2022/05/30 by Bettina Baldt, Thomas Slunecko
Arts and Humanities · Health Professions · #Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies #Patient-Provider Communication in Healthcare
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/10410236.2022.2065736
openalex publication_date 2022/05/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
This article critically examines the four patterns of shared medical decision making (physician-dominated; physician-defined, patient-made; patient-defined, physician-made; and patient-dominated) suggested by Lippa et al. (2017). The aim of the study is to challenge these patterns with a new data set of conversations between physicians and cancer patients in a hospital ward. We recorded 13 physician-patient-conversations during the medical round in an Austrian hospital, which in total lasted about 1.5 h (language: German). We then categorized the medical decisions found in the data following Lippa et al.'s instructions and further analyzed them with a fine-grained linguistic approach. The study revealed no patient-dominated decisions and one decision, which could not be categorized with one of the patterns. Results from the linguistic approach call into question the generalizability, distinctiveness and validity of the patterns. Finally, the relationship between shared decision making and clinical distributed cognition is discussed.